Fans of college roundball, parochial or not, will enjoy Gasaway’s lively history.
Of hoops, hopes, holy orders, and habits.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that Catholic schools are good at college basketball,” writes ESPN basketball analyst Gasaway. It’s not so much that God is on their side but that over more than a century, Catholic schools such as Gonzaga, Xavier, Seton Hall, Villanova, and Georgetown have put their sports energies into basketball, sometimes forgoing football in the process. Granted, Loyola University Chicago had a 98-year-old nun named Sister Jean to cheer on the players when they reached the 2018 Final Four. “We pray hard,” she told the author, “and we pray before every game. Sometimes it’s only a prayer. Sometimes I give the scouting report then.” As Gasaway notes, there are some 250 Catholic colleges in the U.S., and 20% play Division 1 ball. What distinguishes many of these schools is consistent excellence in coaching, which, along with the prowess of its players, is what took schools like Seattle University to an unprecedented “four straight appearances at the NCAA tournament” in the 1950s and lands schools like Gonzaga high in the running today. Gasaway covers the lows as well as the highs, including a point-shaving scandal that shook Seton Hall in 1961, lending the school the nickname “Cheatin’ Hall” for some time after, and rivalries between Catholic high schools that spilled over into college, as when Georgetown froze out Washington’s DeMatha High for four decades owing to a coach’s grudge. The highs make up for those bad patches, and they’re appropriately mysterious and sometimes miraculous. As Gasaway concludes at the end of his survey of Catholic playing from the time of James Naismith on, “If there is a specifically Catholic secret sauce for basketball success, it remains elusive.”
Fans of college roundball, parochial or not, will enjoy Gasaway’s lively history.Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1710-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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